Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  Eventually I walked under a highway overpass and the forest started to really open up around me. The street tunneled between trees to connect the two halves of the campus map. It was a curving road with two lanes, a generous sidewalk and a handful of dim street lamps but basically no man-made structures: just woods and more woods. A footpath ran uphill to the left, towards some rundown housing overvalued by virtue of its proximity to campus. A university bus went past me at one point, all moaning engine and groaning shocks. Otherwise, no one at all saw me and I saw no one else. There was no one around to see or be seen on a chilly Friday night.

  As I emerged onto West Campus I strolled by some old houses the school had bought from earlier generations of faculty. Elaborate, expansive homes had been converted into offices for small programs, strangely isolated from the rest of campus: little islands of administrivia in someone else's fairy-story woods. There was an office for “graduate life” (whatever that meant) over here and an environmental studies program over there, all trying to turn the ersatz dining rooms of old money into a place to store paperclips and printer toner. They were lighted like snow globes in a dark curio cabinet, fighting against the shadows with fluorescents and keycard locks. Not all of them were in use. Some of them stood out for being so quiet, so empty, so devoid of signage.

  On a couple I noticed the signs out front were blank and the interiors were completely dark. A disused building, especially one that looks like a house, has a special aura of emptiness it gives off. I live in suburbia and the housing crash of the mid-aughts of the twenty-first century produced more than a few in my neighborhood. They gape at passersby like a corpse in a ditch. Someday a psychologist or an anthropologist or something like that is going to figure out why they stand out so much. Science will gin up some mundane explanation involving a small detail we don't realize we have the capacity to parse. Until then I like to think of it as a malevolent psychic aura detected by some mystic antenna the average human being has forgotten they have. The world is a lot more fun with a little magic left in it.

  The autumn night was beautiful and I was taking my time and enjoying myself. My anxiety over the intruder was dissolving. Maybe he just didn't know what he was doing. Maybe he was new. Maybe his maker got killed right after turning him – it happens more than we like to admit. Maybe he's just plain dumb. Maybe I would find him and it would all work out. Maybe he would try to challenge me and I could get rid of him in a fashion so messy no one would try that again for fifty years. There were a lot of ways this could turn out OK and I was running over them in my mind, playing out scenarios in which I drove him off, killed him, made an ally of him, welcomed him as a subordinate or a peer. I fanned out all the possible happy outcomes in the hand of imagination and waved mental fingers over them, spoiled for choice.

  Of course, that's when I just barely detected his scent again.

  I stopped dead in the street, closed my eyes, opened my ears and took slow, deep, even breaths. I pushed my senses out as far as I could strain them – out across trees and shrubs and humming power lines and leaves just thinking about turning brown – and I couldn't find anything but that one faint trace of a vampire I didn't recognize. I wasn't even entirely sure it had been tonight. I was certain he'd been here, though, and it was the closest I had to a clue so I stood there and sniffed for all I was worth.

  The trail – the faint echo of the impression of the ghost of a trail, but you don't wind up in charge of a state by being lousy at this stuff – led off the same way I was already going and, I suspected, right into the large, beautiful and civilian-packed Sarah P. Duke Gardens. It’s a massive botanical space full of rolling lawns and jogging paths and, at other times, Saturday afternoon play groups, amateur photographers and self-guided tours. It was the sort of landmark where it would be a very, very stupid idea for anyone to hunt or live or otherwise risk discovery. Vampires stay out of huge, beloved, public spaces for the same reason hookers stay off of Main Street. I sighed and shook my head to myself, fluttering my eyes open again. He had to be a kid, I figured. He probably had no idea what he was doing.

  At least a couple of major campus thoroughfares curved around the outer edges of Yet Another Duke This or That. I walked down the side of one until the scent took a sharp right onto a gravel path and disappeared into the darkness. I followed the faint, old olfactory impression and was surprised to detect a faint aroma of human blood underneath it. I was led along by that harmonious mix of vampire and victim, like a cartoon cat dragged nose-first by the scent of a fresh-baked pie, past a storybook babbling brook and around the side of an old hexagonal snack bar at a snail’s pace. I was moving slowly so I could keep my ears and eyes open for anything that might start or jump or otherwise take off running.

  It turned out to be just the squirrels and me though, and whatever other tiny things ran around the Gardens at night. I didn't see or hear or smell any sign of any life form higher than a rabbit. I was a little surprised there weren't some drunken teenagers out in the bushes at this hour, but I was sticking to the main paths as my respective quarries had done. Eventually I meandered across a long, beautiful and entirely out of place Japanese bridge over one end of a large pond, up an abrupt little bit of steps and was deposited in what looked like a street through the ugly part of an industrial park.

  Across from me were the business ends of a couple of random stone buildings and the mechanical detritus they’d tried to sweep out of donors’ view: HVAC systems and dumpsters and whatnot. There was an ambulance outside one of the buildings, parked between a loading dock and the largest stand-alone air conditioning unit I had ever seen, and I figured that to be the campus infirmary or whatever colleges call such things these days. I crossed the street, weaved between traffic barriers designed to keep the hoi polloi from intruding on the parking spaces of the tenured, and up some steps that emptied, much to my ignorant surprise, onto a quad that looked like it could be on any Ivy League campus anytime in the last century: trimmed hedges, stone walkways, neatly mown lawns and memorial benches on which no one ever sat.

  Collectively they were bordered by buildings of almost identical and slightly antiquated design: more huge gray and occasionally beige rocks set together with mortar, windows tall and narrow and shielded from the elements by being set far back into the stone facades. I couldn't imagine it was ever very bright in there during the day, but of course I wasn't in any hurry to find out. Some were clearly more modern than others – the stone was lighter in color, from fewer decades of accumulated pollution no amount of pressure washing could ever really remove – and over the huge banks of double doors on the largest building of all, the one to the right, the one out beside of which there was an ambulance parked, a sign cleared its throat and tastefully proclaimed: DUKE HOSPITAL – SOUTH ENTRANCE in restrained letters.

  “Good gods,” I muttered. They had an entrance to the hospital – half or more of the reason for that whole “City of Medicine” title – right there on one of the main quads of the campus. The trail of scent went directly up to those doors and, I presumed, through them and beyond. I chuckled a little. The intruder, whoever he was, had pulled a standard vampire trick: he'd gone to where there are plenty of blood bags and made off with a few and that was what I smelled. Maybe he was smarter than I'd thought.

  Maybe we wouldn't have any trouble after all.

  I let out a long breath, relaxed a little and then had another look around. I'd lived in Raleigh for years but I'd rarely if ever come to Duke to just walk around. It wasn't something I did much. I tended to stay around home or go downtown, like most of us do. Durham is just minutes away but it has always been kind of devoid of vampires and I've never really known why. Some towns are like that: they just aren't attractive to us. At some point Durham had become that way and we'd stayed mostly out of it ever since.

  I decided to walk towards the huge bell tower not too far off, figuring it was probably the “chapel” I'd heard about: a cathedral built by Protestants and given a modes
t name suggesting they were a little embarrassed to find themselves putting on airs. There wasn't anyone on the quad except for the occasional distant footfall of someone leaving an office late. I didn't even hear the burble of student parties in the offing. I’d figured any Friday night on a college campus would be rocking and rolling.

  I marveled at how beautiful and dark and still the campus seemed to be. Here there was peace and quiet and it deepened the closer I got to the chapel. A structure like that imposes its own order on a place, its own set of rules, and people follow them without even realizing they're there. I passed by a long, low, wide set building with a sign out front reading Perkins Library. I couldn't help but notice something unusual: a door propped open with a rock and, in something I later decided was a sign of psychological symmetry to the other subject of this tale, a propped door was nothing if not an invitation to investigate.

  I noticed that the sign on the door said that the library was open 24 hours but then, taped to its inside glass pane, a second sign made out of typewriter paper read FALL BREAK HOURS and showed that, actually, there weren't any. The library was closed from Thursday afternoon through Sunday morning on the assumption everyone would be out of town.

  That must be why I hadn’t seen anyone and didn’t hear any parties.

  The sign only made me even more curious as to why the front door of the undergraduate library would be so haphazardly open. I shook out a coat sleeve and used it to cover my palm and fingers. I pulled the door very slowly open, slipped through and brought it back to rest against its makeshift doorstop behind me without a sound.

  Inside, in the distance, I could hear something interesting: a dull thud, with a light echo, repeating very slowly.

  THUD.

  THUD.

  THUD.

  Then I heard the voice of a young man say, “Damn it! Why won't you break! Damn it, damn it, damn it! Damned coated glass!” I arced both eyebrows towards the sky, rolled onto my toes and started creeping slowly and quietly towards the middle of the main floor.

  From around the side of a reference desk I could see the back of a twenty-something guy wearing the standard college apparel: blue jeans, black tennis shoes, a t-shirt in the dark blue that is Duke's main school color. He had tawny, close-cropped hair that had been trimmed with clippers into that not-a-crew-cut crew cut a lot of the kids were wearing. I couldn't see his face but I could hear in his voice that he was just desperate to get into the huge glass display case in front of him. It was a rectangle larger than a man, the sort of structure you'd see protecting a delicate sculpture in a museum. I couldn't see what was in it; just that whatever it was, it was lighted from below. I mentally clucked my tongue; a thief stealing from a University library is either really dumb or really smart. On the one hand, there's plenty of security around; on the other, they want something of academic value so badly they’ll pick a lock and try to smash a glass case to get at it.

  The kid turned around so I could see him in profile for a moment: good looks, strong jaw, but a meanness in his expression that spoke of something really terrible having happened to him or maybe just of the lack of anything really good. It was the look of someone who's pissed off, not someone merely desperate or greedy. It also gave me a chance to see what was in the display case and it was a little surprising: a blue and silver devil costume made of something that looked improbably like satin. The Duke mascot is The Blue Devil, a horned cartoon devil in a blue and white outfit, and the mascot is a guy in one of those big, foam bodysuits with the oversized head: a cartoon in three dimensions wearing a goofy expression.

  This devil costume was nothing like that. It was elegant. It was theatrical. It was trim and slim and it would take an athlete to wear it. On the right body it would complement their physique in the same fashion as a tailored shirt or a frock coat. There was an informational pedestal outside the case, standing on the floor, but I couldn’t read it from there.

  The kid picked up a wooden library chair with surprising ease and hefted it sideways, measuring its weight in his hands, lining up for a swing. “I wish I could wait,” he said. I had the absurd impression he was addressing the devil costume itself. “I wish I could do this with my own hands, but it hasn't been long enough. No matter. I'll use the tools available to me, however rough they are.”

  He swung the chair and the glass splintered inside its thin protective anti-shatter sheath. It wasn’t safety-coated, as he’d complained. It was bulletproof glass just like Bob had in every window of the Lincoln Towncar I’d cracked open the night he died. I knew exactly what it looked like when someone shattered that kind of glass. This kid had just managed to spider web it with the leg of a chair. The chair split apart from the force of the impact.

  This kid was strong.

  He then reared back and punched the splintered glass in the very center of the web of fractures, unshielded, and a hole opened up like a mouth ringed in jagged teeth. The kid started tearing at the edges of that hole with his bare hands, expanding it and knocking out other sections until finally he was standing in front of the suit with nothing between him and it. I could hear the smile in his voice when he spoke to it again. “I cannot wait to show the world El Diablo Azul.”

  He paused, seemed to be thinking about something and added, “Maybe... I am El Diablo and I welcome you to hell?” He said it again a couple of times, with minor variations: “Welcome to Purgatory? No. No. Get a load of your devil now?” He laughed at that, then paused and clucked his tongue. “No, just, 'I am... El Diablo!' Yeah. That works.” He reached forward and lifted the mannequin wearing the costume from the case, set it aside, and started to take off his own clothes.

  Never a dull night, I guess. Not that I objected. The kid was pretty ripped.

  That’s when the smell of his blood hit me.

  He'd sliced open one of his knuckles – only one, which was itself shocking – when he punched out the glass. The aroma had eventually wafted this far and the smell of it was like, gods, I'm not sure how to describe it to you. Take all your favorite smells: baking bread, pumpkin spice, the cologne of your best friend, autumn leaves, spring flowers, jasmine, mint, curing tobacco, a charcoal grill, a fresh orange, rain, pine sap, sweat after sex. Roll them all up, not into one smell but into one experience of smell, one emotional response to all those things at once.

  I'm a vampire. I love the smell of blood, yes, but this blood was something else. This blood was indescribably special. This wasn’t a perfume sample on a paper card in a fashion magazine. This was being at the factory, suspended over a great big vat.

  I smelled the blood of this blond-ginger, athletic, whiny, under-dressed for the weather kid and in it I could detect life and youth and vigor and agency and desire and anger and hope. What I didn't smell was fear. Vampires are good at smelling fear, of course, and I didn't detect a bit of it. Well, maybe a little, just around the edges, just around the part of him that as a small child was told we do not steal, no matter what. It was hiding from the rest of him, though, or he’d beaten it down. The rest of him was just power and a want to exercise that power and I wanted something, too: I wanted that blood and I wasn't even especially hungry that night.

  I realized my fangs had dropped and I was salivating. Normally we try so hard to be more discreet and restrained. It was like getting a boner in the middle of dessert.

  The kid had stripped down by this point and realized his hand was bleeding. Licking the blood off – oh, Jesus Hambone Christ in the merry month of May, did he have to linger over it like that? - he walked off and out of sight in exactly as casual a fashion as one might expect of a beautiful young person who thinks he is alone and knows his body is perfect. I was trying to fight my fangs back into my face and thinking about baseball wasn't helping any.

  I realized this was my chance to read the marker next to the display. Figuring I would hear his return way before he’d see my escape, I sprang up from behind the reference desk and shot across the room. The small rectangle of brown plastic
read, in white beveled letters:

  MACHINE-SEWN SATIN AND COTTON

  C. 1952

  The suit itself was a kind of foppish dark blue top. The waist was tapered, the chest built for deep breaths and the shoulders broad. The fabric was shiny and I wasn't entirely sure I bought it was real satin: maybe sateen instead. It had a silver-white oxford collar and puffy sleeves that came to tight cuffs of white. The whole thing looked custom tailored to fit one person and one person alone, presumably the person who was the mascot during that era. The pants were a reverse of the design: mostly white but with beautiful blue fire running up the legs, like the mascot's calves were being consumed by sapphire flames. They shimmered in the light. They begged the wearer to run and to be seen running.

  To the eyes of a vampire who’d only ever lived in the era of mass-produced garments this was one of the most beautiful pieces of clothing I’d seen. There were no shoes but there was a matching dark blue cowl with holes for eyes and a slightly beaked nose. It was topped by big, plush devil horns. It was, I had to say, a damned good-looking suit and it probably looked great on a guy with the right physique. The kid trying to steal it fit the bill.

  I heard the bathroom door open in the distance so I shot back around to behind the reference desk and then under it. Bare feet padded back up to the display case. I peeked over in time to see the kid slide the shirt off the mannequin with a reverence bordering on the religious. He wasn't just stealing a uniform here, or a historical object of interest to a certain limited set of aged alumni. He was literally donning a new persona. That was what all that El Diablo stuff clearly had been about.

  It was a lot like I imagined it would be watching someone get turned into a vampire.